Two Guardian articles on tobacco habit with interesting messages

Lungs damaged by smoking can 'magically' heal – study - good news - it's never too late - the body heals. And I think we can help it heal by sending ourselves healing messages and not getting to uptight about it. And maybe the biosphere can heal too in some similar way from the damage we keep doing much akin to a chronic, self-destructive smoker.  Good luck to us all!

and

Crab Shells Dissolving

Pacific Ocean acidity rising

Bloody Day

Walked to Bali Mandara hospital to see the ear, nose, and throat doctor. She said the perforation in my ear had closed up so I can swim again. Halleluiah. So that was a month ago. I'd only swum twice in ten weeks, both failed attempts to keep the ear dry and after the second time, it got infected again. But abstention and discipline had paid off. Happily I left the hospital to walk home and had four accients on the way, the first when I ran across the busy divided bypass and smashed my foot into a sharp place on a curb. That resulted in a good deal of blood, tissues from the nice rattan store guy, and a hosing off outside an eatery.

Errands

Stopped by the corner phone shack and bought Katrinka some data for Internet access in her iPhone and I know hers expires at midnight. On the way back home will drop into the small local post office to pay the water bill and buy 500,000 rupiah of electric pulsa for the home, the maximum the sweet woman there can sell. She’s already got our info so she sees me, we chat, she gives me the bill, I pay, and she gives me the receipt with the 20 numbers I have to write into a box on a wall on the porch and about 320 kilowatts appears on our account. We use about 16 KW a day so it costs almost two bucks a day. But before the post office, a walk to Bali Mandara Hospital to get my ear checked, to see if the perforation has closed and I can go swimming again. Will tell about that and subsequent events in tomorrow’s exciting instalment of Life in Sanur. [photo - corner place where I bought the phone data for Katrinka.]

100 Seconds!

Doomsday Clock gets closer than ever. ---------The symbolic Doomsday Clock, which indicates how close our planet is to complete annihilation, is now only 100 seconds away from midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) said on Thursday that the change was made due to nuclear proliferation, failure to tackle climate change and "cyber-based disinformation".

Ice Sculpting

Kelly Chadwick as the spokesperson makes the KHQ TV news when his Spirit Pruners biz in Spokane joins with another arborist biz to sculpt blocks of ice.

Good Friends Visit - Yeah!

Best buds from Japan - first met in 1988 - who come to Bali every year to screw around and shop for their outlets in the US came to visit with Katrinka and me on Tuesday. Here we all are on the corner of our gang (alley) and the street after a lunch at the beach and rain. L to r DC, Bandita, Jay, Katrinka, Jake, Kyoko.

Jay and Kyoko's Japanese and Bali (and other Asian) arts and crafts are available in Seattle from their warehouse at times - Kyoto Art and Antiques. Jake and his wife Yuko have Kodo Arts Japanese antiques in Nevada City, CA.

One more Fungette

Kelly had some sort of calling toward fungi from when he was small. Elizabeth Sawyer was taking care of the kids at the SFZC City Center one day in about 1978 when Kelly was about five. She took the over to the Green Gulch Greengrocer and let them chose what they wanted. They all chose ice cream or chocolate or something sweet except for Kelly who got a bag of mushrooms.

That reminds me of a time when Peter Rudick (I think) and I took the kids to a Steve Wonder concert (I think) at the Oakland Colusium (I think). Afterwords we went to a Pancake House and all got pancakes - except Kelly who got a salad.

What would be an appropriate comment now? - DC 

Even More on Fungi

Clay was two and a half. He, Kelly, and I drove from Santa Fe to Fort Worth overnight, leaving after living there for a year with Elin. Kelly was 20, visiting and helping us get ready for the move. Elin had driven a rental truck to Bay Area then flew to DFW to meet us. Before K, C, and I left, we visited some folks - Bob Watkins and other friends in Taos at a powwow, Joan Halifax, Josh Shrei and a party of others Kelly's age who were having a hair party - cutting, dying, mohawks. We both got our heads shaved. And we visited with Willem Malten of the wonderful Cloud Cliff Bakery who gave us a big bag of mushrooms and told us to set aside a day to eat them all at once for the maximum effect. He was into the Terrance McKenna trip where when one gets high on them one is melding with the mind of the mushrooms which are from outer space and bring love. I gave up psychedelics in 67 so I told Kelly he could keep them, but as I drove at night with him and Clay asleep, I decided I could take one tiny nibble off one. That got me as high as I could be and still feel okay driving. Wow. I had to concentrate constantly, and decided to follow Willem's advice and let the love of the mushrooms guide me and it all worked out with me softly chanting "All is love" as I drove into the night.

More on Fungi

David Arora who wrote Mushrooms Demystified, has a spread up in Mendo County. Clay, Katrinka, and I met fungi fan Kelly there once - on one of his many trips near us where there was one chance to meet. We were the only three who weren't deeply into fungi. So we drank rare puer tea (I have some here from a collector in KL whose stash is worth his son told me a few hundred thousand bucks), then we went foraging on his land. Then returned and drank more tea while mushrooms were cooked up. As we ate through the assortment, Kelly said that every one of them on our plates are classified as poisonous. He said that they, or at least these particular ones, loose their poison in cooking. But then he further added, "But I'm a little worried about this one." Kelly has always maintained that all mushrooms should be cooked, that they're carcinogenic if not. I got a buzz off those shrooms and was pleasantly high from it as we drove back. Kelly also worked for Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti fame way back. They and Andy Weil whom I'd introduced Kelly to years before and one other guy who kept big cats including a snow leopard, would go foraging together.  

Kelly Chadwick's Fungi writings revisited

Was just corresponding with poet and bud Jane Hirshfield who referred to son Kelly's long fling with fungi and how she'd become adept enough to forage and be confident she wasn't going to poison herself. She said she'd talked with a museum curator on San Juan Island, far from Kelly's haunts up in Spokane country, who said that Kelly was as well-known and respected as anyone in the field. Wow. Really. I don't know so much about musrooms but I sure liked the book of poems about mushrooms that Kelly did with his former mate Renee: Decomposition: Fungi Inspired Poems.

And then there's the great series he wrote for a nature site on wild edibiles. Most of them are on cuke.com at http://www.cuke.com/family/edibles.htm

Cat Ovens!

Balinese aren't known for eating dogs. That's folks from other islands who've come here. When one sees RW posted in front of a store, it means they sell dog meat. Don't see that often. What I do see more often are signs announcing that an establishment has a cat oven. Here's a photo of one of those signs. Shocked? Horrified? Why? Cat (pronounced chat) is Indonesian for paint and bengkel for shop. That sign announces a paint oven shop - a place to get your car a nice new look.

Oceans Warming Faster

from Guardian - “The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming,” said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, US, and one of the team behind the new analysis. “Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news.”

Another song from DC's Defuser Music

Here's one named Good Enough - for Katrinka's birthday last November 17th, sung to her at a birthday dinner party. 

Hope Springs Eternal

Food from Air - sort of  - BBC

And more on this with lots of details - Guardian

OK Boomerang!

Here's a tune for these times from your truly - OK Boomerang - that's a Youtube page

Here's a page for OK Boomerang
on my defusermusic.com

Russia Warming

What Russia's doing about getting lots warmer.

Spiraliing into what we don't want

Submarine to explore why Antarctic glacier is melting so quickly - Guardian

'Coming towards us like a monster': High winds increase Australia fire fears

Meanwhile this has been unleashed and won't stop, not just the Russians, Cambridge Analytica lead the way - so that at a time when the world sorely needs good managment, chaos is being stirred up globally for the pleasure of a few.

Old Family Photo

May 3, 1945. - That's my mother, Ahdel on the left with me almost three months old, then her younger sis Eleanor, Granny Reich with my sister Susan, cousins Karl and Penny with their mom, Brunhilda. I think it's taken at Granny's home. See it big and read more details here at a family page on cuke. - DC

By chance found this photo at https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery-beta/img/20036371

My mother is 30 there. Never saw a photo of her like that. 

Climate change hope

For hydrogen fuel - BBC

Better hurry - Australia well-publicised brush fires and Jakarta floods: 'Not ordinary rain'

Happy New Year!

from DC. This is cuke.com's 22nd year and Cuke Annex's 2nd